Learn How To Use Your Digital Camera

Photographing in a Pumpkin Patch

My wife and I were stopping at one of our local pumpkin patches to pick up pumpkins to carve for Halloween. For some families this is a casual affair. My wife, however, is a serious connoisseur of pumpkins and is driven to inspect at least half of the harvest in each field. This leaves me plenty of time to create images.

If possible, I try to delay our arrival until late afternoon. The low angle of the sun produces warm light that accentuates the orange and yellow tones of my subjects. Backlighting is perfect for that scarecrow in the corn field and positioning the camera low to the ground near some perfect pumpkins accentuates my subjects while a shallow depth of field allows me to soften people and cornstalks in the background. Some displays of gourds and squash are situated in the shade, so I switch my white balance to open shade in order to get back all the warm tones we associate with the fall season.

As the farm stand closes for the day, my wife loads our truck with half a dozen pumpkins for carving and several kinds of squash for cooking. My harvest arrives a little later as I download these fun images to my computer for final output.